1942: The Battle of the Westfjords

A long belated addition, but I have finally completed something that was meant to go with the 1942 year of updates. It is threadmarked appropriatedly, so readers should find it with the other 1942 updates when reading through.

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The Battle of the Westfjords

German Aims and Preparations

Planning for what would become “Operation Hanseatic” began with Britain’s declaration of war and the entry of Japan into the world war. From the outset, the operation was frustrated by competing ambitions. The clique around Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, the conservative orthodoxy most distant to the centres of Nazi ideology, wished to inflict a reversal of the blockade of the Great War on Britain, disrupting trade amidst a Royal Navy scattered and divided holding down the sea lanes of Britain’s far flung colonial empire.

The more Nazified young guard in the Navy, with the ear of Göring who controlled the fleet’s carriers through his monopoly on all things aeronautical, remained totally fixated on the Drang Nach Osten. The WFRN, similarly divided between the Atlantic and the Pacific, now held a tenuous guard over the Arctic convoy routes to the Soviet Union. A break out into the Atlantic would inflict a decisive blow to the WFRN, and strangle the trade route.

In the political struggle, the plan grew in scope, with greater ambitions. Task group raids turned into a full deployment of the surface fleet. At Hitler’s insistence, troops would now be landed in a lightning raid on Iceland, thinly garrisoned by the Americans, ultimately establishing a base that would simultaneously throttle trade to the UK and the USSR.

It is easy with hindsight to dismiss the operation as overly ambitious. But politically, there was a crude logic to it. In 1942, there was no United Nations, no unified struggle against fascism. The wars in the west and east of the Europe were separate affairs, and Hitler had already won on the continent in a single stroke, establishing a regime in France that on paper appeared the legitimate face of the French fatherland while increasingly functioning as a puppet of German ambitions in the smoke filled rooms out of public eyes. Morale in the UK was tenuous at best. The people felt betrayed by the government, the elites demoralized. Back channel communications continued behind the back of the Attlee/Churchill duumvirate for the negotiation of a white peace that would allow the British government to exit the conflict and save face.

Restoring Iceland to the control of the puppet Danish state could serve as the impetus for such a white peace, lest the German navy now credibly threaten British merchant shipping from such a forward operating base.

Similarly, many factions in the British Foreign Office continued to mistrust American intentions at least as severely as the Germans. Without an accord between the cobelligerents, it was feared, with some justification, that the UASR would take the globally beleaguered Royal Navy’s period of weakness as an opportunity to transform the Second World War into a Hobbesian war of all against all, seizing Canada and the British Caribbean.

The final arrangements had ballooned from a simple lightning raid to the largest surface action since the Great War. Planned meticulously by Admiral Rolf Carls, Operation Hanseatic would involve most of the German surface fleet, commanded by Admiral Günther Lütjens, divided into three task groups. The fast wing would consist of most of the Kriegsmarine’s modern battleships: the three Bismarck -class ships designed with heavy influence from Royal Navy, and two of the super-heavy Friedrich der Große -class battleships, escorted by four Hipper -class heavy cruisers and eight light cruisers.

The slow wing consisted of the five pre-treaty battleships that Germany was allowed to retain, albeit with some deep modernizations: the four Bayern -class ships and the single Pommern -class allowed to be retained and completed. The slow-wing would travel with the troop carriers and most of the Kriegsmarine’s older cruisers and destroyers, totaling four CAs, four CLs, and 18 destroyers.

The Kriegsmarine’s fledgling fleet air arm would make its operational debut after years of training with British and Japanese advisors. One converted ocean liner, Europa , with 38 aircraft, and two purpose-built ships, the Graf Zeppelin and Peter Strasser , with 43 and 45 aircraft respectively, would be accompanied by the Scharnhorst and Gneisnau battleships.

German operational plans banked on the geographic dispersion of both the Royal Navy and the WFRN. Particularly following the major losses in capital ships incurred by the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean campaign, and with much of the WFRN forced to deploy to the Pacific to counter the IJN, a concentrated Kriegsmarine surface fleet could, in theory, defeat in detail the North Atlantic detachments of both allies.

Phase one of Operation Hanseatic, the breakout, would likely incur surface action with the Home Fleet in the heavily patrolled North Sea. Intelligence predicted a force of only three battleships could be mustered in time to engage, likely supported by two fleet carriers, but with great confidence in land-based aircraft in Norway, Admiral Carls calculated that the Home Fleet would avoid action unless ambushed.

In the second phase, the task force would steam at speed towards Iceland, skirting around potential danger spots from land based patrols from the Shetland Islands. With convoy traffic scattered in the wake of diversionary U-boat attacks and false plans disseminated of a major Axis France fleet deployment, the task force would steam to the northern approaches of Iceland, where they would begin aerial attacks on the identified American air and naval resources on the island. With the fast wing and carriers traversing the Denmark strait to screen them, the slow-wing’s battleships would bombard the city of Reykjavik while troops landed on the relatively flat beaches southwest of the city. Without any major harbor defenses, it was expected that the ‘liberation’ of Iceland would be a fait accompli with boots on the ground.

Other, more complicated versions of the plan were contemplated but ultimately rejected. The Führer distrusted the security of high-level diplomatic cables, and in the few face-to-face summits with Petain and Mussolini, talk of joint naval operations could not overcome the basic stumbling block of seniority. Each man was more than happy to lead joint-operations, but could not countenance his ships being subordinated to a foreign admiral.

American preparations

WFRN counter-operations began thanks to a breaking of the naval Enigma cipher between 14 March and 4 June 1942. With the help of the Bell Labs Mk 1 electronic computer, the extant four rotor Naval Enigma machines had been cryptanalyzed, with their messages able to be deciphered in a timely manner at Langley. The produce of this cryptanalysis, before the Kriegsmarine deployed new rotor wirings and new operational features that reduced the effectiveness of flash traffic cribs for intuiting board and rotor settings, forced a long redesign of the WFRN’s “bombe” codebreaker machines.

Additionally, Hitler had moved much of the high-level planning of the operation to secure diplomatic cables, encrypted by the Lorenz cipher, the cryptanalysis of which was still ongoing and would require the physical tapping of telegraph cables.

The Main Reconnaissance Directorate was still able to assemble a hazy, incomplete picture of German aims in the North Atlantic. By July, a rough operational timetable, forces and targets had been intuited, but this had built foundations that grew shakier with each passing day.

As a countermeasure, Task Force 23 was assembled in New England under the command of Rear Admiral Yitzak Levin, while the American delegation to the Court of St. James’s were hard at work trying to coordinate for combined action against the possible threat. Perhaps due to wishful thinking, the British Admiralty was dismissive of the threat and saw little reason to assist the Americans in their ongoing occupation of Iceland.

Matters were further complicated when the expected operational date of 6 August came and went. With scarce information coming out of Nazi Germany, the Stavka accepted Levin’s plea to wait for two weeks. When the two weeks passed uneventfully without any further intelligence breakthroughs, half of Levin’s ships were transferred to the Pacific, where they were urgently needed against the increasingly assertive IJN.

When the alarm finally sounded in early September, Levin would only have a handful of ships left, and would be forced to cobble together his taskforce from whatever he could beg, borrow or steal, including stripping a major convoy of capital ship protection and leaving them to the tender of mercy of French cruiser raiders.

Made possible only by extensive development of the doctrine of underway replenishment, Levin was able to assemble five battleships and two battlecruisers, along with a single carrier, and only by running them hard. With his flag aboard the Monitor , accompanied by its sister ship Haiti , the two Wat Tyler- class ships Jean-Paul Marat and Michael Kohlhaas , the lead ship of the Nat Turner -class, and the freshly modernised battlecruiser Constellation , he’d be well outmatched in a direct gun duel should the German capital ship wings combine.

Enterprise and her escort the battlecruiser Lexington would have to steer well clear of the surface action and hold the skies while outnumbered three decks to one. The Enterprises ’ air wing of 80 was powerful, but the three German carriers, whatever their weaknesses, could launch and recover in rotation to cover one another.

Alea iacta est

With the British Royal Navy struggling to hold the central position in the Mediterranean and South Atlantic, the weakened Home Fleet could not afford any risk of confronting the Kriegsmarine’s maneuver through the North Sea. On September 15th, a Royal Navy squadron headed by the battlecruiser HMS Anson and the carrier HMS Eagle were caught out by the unexpected sortie of nearly the entire surface fleet.

Running at flank, the German fleet stole a night’s march on the Royal Navy squadron, utilizing reports from land-based reconnaissance planes from Norway to achieve surprise. Initial carrier aviation attacks failed to deliver decisive damage, but the armor piercing bomb dropped on Eagle ‘s deck crippled her ability to launch. By 11 o’clock, the German fast wing closed to gunnery range of the limping British ships, sinking them both, along with two cruisers in close escort.

Fear of invasion reached a fever pitch, and the beleaguered wartime government, still putting its house in order from the devastating losses in France and North Africa, was caught entirely flat footed. Reports leaked to the papers, and His Majesty’s government was forced to acknowledge the loss at PM’s questions. With every man jack now summoned to the Home Guard to face an invasion that had previously been considered a year away, the Home Fleet stuck close to land-based air coverage, while the Germans refueled at Bergen and went quietly on their way to rendezvous with an advance squadron of destroyers stationed in the occupied Faroe Islands.

Levin’s reduced Task Force put to sea from Boston on the 17th, joining with Enterprise and Lexington taken from Atlantic Convoy duty near St. Johns, Newfoundland. After a final underway replenishment, TF 23 dashed northward.

Simultaneously, the German combined fleet departed from the Faroe Islands. They were up in score and they knew it, and freshly blooded from action against the Royal Navy, the Kriegsmarine’s confidence in its abilities surged. With fuel and planes topped off, the next phase of Hanseatic began. While Commander Genda Minoru, the chief IJN attache, was sharply critical of the limitations of the German carriers, he offered no objection to continuing the operation. Aerial attacks on land-based aviation near Reykjavik began on schedule, with a sixty plane raid taking off at sunrise on September 20th.

The WFRA had a single understrength composite aviation regiment available on Iceland, and the WFRN’s assets in the theater were oriented almost exclusively to long-range patrol and submarine hunting. The political realities of the occupation of neutral Iceland had forced absolutely minimal commitments of men and materiel, and even with the opening of the Western Front, the situation had not changed. Even as German intentions became clearer, reinforcement of the minimal garrison had been avoided because of ongoing British efforts to transfer the island to their jurisdiction.

The result was a massacre. Failures in radar operations ensured that even the understrength regiment was too slow to mobilise. Half the strength was destroyed in the initial wave, and the island aerodromes were extensively damaged in the attack. Seven German aircraft failed to return. A subsequent attack destroyed the remaining combat strength of the 404th Composite Aviation Regiment. Air operations would continue, targeting shore installations around the landing approaches, as the seaplane tender Immelman rendezvoused with the German combined fleet to transfer spare airframes and replacement pilots to recover operational losses.

Between a rock and steel

The German landings began on the morning of September 22nd; the furious thunder of the 38 cm guns of the German slow wing was entirely notional. The WFRA’s 3rd Light Rifle Brigade did not contest the landings directly. Instead, they dug in outside of the range of the German guns, and began to hit the landing areas with artillery as the troops waded ashore. Despite two days of aerial bombardment, the Luftwaffe had failed to destroy WFRN Long Range Aviation assets. The PBY Catalina seaplanes continued to operate from their protected fjords, feeding accurate aerial reconnaissance about German operational plans.

While the brigade could not hope to prevail against two divisions the Wehrmacht was committing to the invasion, it could fight a long delaying act. While the swastika was quickly raised over the city of Reykjavik, the initial landing wave could not break out from the Reykjanes Peninsula. With heights held north and east of the city with stubborn resistance, Admiral Lütjens began to suspect he had led his fleet into a trap. Whispers from German sympathizers among the locals reinforced this fear.

Levin’s TF 23 had been stalking Lütjens fleet for the better part of a day, haunting just beyond the range of German reconnaissance, waiting as the ships clustered to support the landing. And on the morning of the 23rd, the hammer fell. A strike package of 36 BTM Maulers, outfitted with a mix of armor piercing bombs and torpedoes launched before sunrise, escorted by 12 F6F Sabocat fighters. Their quarry, the German carriers, were still busy rearming for ship-to-ship combat. Though spotted on radar, the Germans were slow to react, and too few fighters were launched in time to seriously hinder the attack.

Graf Zeppelin and Peter Strasser , like the Royal Navy carriers they imitated, had hoped to weather enemy attack through the virtues of armored flight decks. There had been a logic to this, especially with the dense expected operational environment of the North Sea, within the range of land-based aviation that had long outmatched carrier aviation. But time had rolled on, with carrier planes closing the gap with their land-based counterparts. Out in the open Atlantic, against the massed aviation marshalled by the Enterprise , especially deadly fast torpedo bombers crewed by well-trained naval aviators, this was a forlorn hope.

The German carriers had scattered from their formation, and in this chaos, the density of anti-aircraft artillery was seriously thinned. Still learning the ropes, the German carrier escorts could not stick close enough to ward off a massed attack, and individually each ship’s anti-aircraft armament proved insufficient.

Once the Sabocats had swatted away fighter cover, the dive bombers struck first. Europa took two hits on her forward flight deck and began to burn like hellfire. One armor piercing bomb struck the Peter Strasser but failed to penetrate the flight deck. The 500 kg bomb still destroyed several aircraft still left on the deck, setting raging fires as well as scattering shrapnel into AA gun positions. Aside from a hit to the light cruiser Nürnberg , the rest of the dive bombers missed their marks. A near miss caused minor flooding on the Graf Zeppelin , but the danger was far from over.

With the Europa already turned to fire and brimstone, the torpedo bombers elected to concentrate all their efforts on the other two carriers. Graf Zeppelin was engaged by a textbook three-echelon torpedo attack, with bombers approaching simultaneously from the port, bow, and starboard, bracketing the ship as she tried to maneuver. Her choice to maneuver to port proved fatal, exposing the already weakened starboard torpedo bulge to a spread from six bombers. One struck the destroyer Z27 operating in close escort, ultimately sinking her. A further two confirmed detonations rocked Graf Zeppelin 45 and 52 seconds later, respectively hitting frames 9 and 13, both ends of the boiler rooms.

Graf Zeppelin ‘s torpedo protection regime was already not adequate for the WFRN Mk 25 torpedo and its 350 kg warhead, but already weakened from a near miss, it failed entirely. Shockwaves compromised the watertight bulkheads in adjacent frames, and the rapid flooding of the boilers put the ship dead in the water.

Peter Strasser was likely struck by a single torpedo in the attack, but it failed to detonate. Survivor accounts note a sudden ringing heard below decks consistent with a Mk 25 hitting at 40 knots, but at any rate the day had already gone badly enough. And it was early.

As the American raiders left, the situation continued to worsen on both Europa and Graf Zeppelin. The converted liner proved inadequate to the task of damage control, and the fire continued to spread through the hangers into the ship’s structure, fueled by avgas lines and other accelerants. Two hours after the attack, Captain-at-sea Hoffmann* requested permission to abandon ship, and was reluctantly given leave to. The sight of Graf Zeppelin keel up perhaps motivated this quick decision.

Graf Zeppelin , already top-heavy from her armored flight deck and medium-calibre surface armament, listed dangerously within twenty minutes of the torpedoing. Attempts at counterflooding slowed the inevitable, and once sea water displaced the oil in her leaking oil bunkers, the situation became dire. Reserve power systems failed, and damage control teams were unable to restore the pumps in time to prevent the ship from completely heeling over.

“Into formation, the hunt has begun”

Aboard Lütjens’ flagship Bismarck , Commander Genda and fleet intelligence officer Frigate Captain Scholz* jointly concurred that the close coordination of the aerial attack and observed squadron markings indicated an attack by the air wing of a single carrier. While stressing that it was possible a second carrier was in theater, they both recommended engaging promptly. Scout planes from the cruiser Admiral Hipper had successfully tailed the American carrier aircraft back to Enterprise.

With no other carriers spotted by aerial reconnaissance, and the American battle line observed steaming northwards with deadly purpose, Lütjens gave the order to consolidate the heavy ships for surface action.

A second wave departed from Enterprise in the early afternoon, chasing after the sightings reported by fleet-based reconnaissance. Thanks to spares pulled from storage, it was nearly full strength, but hitting the consolidated German battle line proved more difficult. Unable to locate Peter Strasser , the bombers attacked the German battle line, but mistook the older Deutschland- class raiders Admiral Lutzow and Admiral Graf Spee for true capital ships. The raiders, which were to detach after the completion of the primary objective and begin convoy hunting, were both sunk by multiple torpedo strikes. The Pommern , operating close by, received a single torpedo to her bow thanks to her quick maneuvering, taking only moderate damage.

The dive bombers mortally wounded the light cruiser Karlsruhe , and nearly bullseyed Bismarck’s P2 15 cm turret, obliterating it as well as jamming the P1 turret.

German AA gunners acquitted themselves well, successfully driving multiple torpedo planes to drop early. When the planes returned, Levin was sufficiently emboldened by claims of “3-4 capital ships sunk or disabled”, despite the losses in planes and air crew, to move in for the kill. Still, cautious and determined to use his control of the skies, he ordered Enterprise to shift to hunting German scout planes and observing the Germans, at least until Peter Strasser ‘s track could be fixed.

Simultaneously, Lütjens was determined to not be pecked to death by aerial attack. The American carrier was operating dangerously close, and would not be able to operate effectively at night. A night battle would have to be risked, and ordered his ships to steal a night’s march on the American task force.

Levin, aware that his foe probably still outnumbered him even if he could count on having sunk four battleships, a hypothesis that grew less likely with each new radio report, detoured his task force southward behind a squall. As night’s curtain fell, his cruisers and destroyers poked into the dark.

Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning

The two task forces had avoided crashing into each other in the night, but Levin’s delaying tactic had worked. Having slipped south-by-southeast of Lütjens and closed to within eighty kilometers by dawn, action was all but assured. Lütjens had remained grouped up, tied down by his older but still powerful Bayern -class dreadnoughts, and he was reluctant to run their engines too hard outside of critical action.

By now, Levin was reasonably confident he would face between ten and twelve capital ships. To bait Lütjens into separating his wings, he assigned the older Lexington the duty of leading a reconnaissance-in-force, accompanied by four heavy cruisers and a minimal screen of lighter ships. Capable of operating at 33 knots, the Lexington task group would stalk close and engage the German screens at the lead of their column, feinting an attempt to cross-the-t of the German battleline. The resulting maneuver would, with luck, provoke a chase.

It could also send them all to their deaths if they failed to detach in time. Lexington and her surviving sister ships were not regarded as especially fit for action against other capital ships. Too many compromises had been made chasing speed with 1910s vintage design and shipbuilding technology, resulting in poor sea-keeping and a main armored belt that, while adequate against older guns, was too short to adequately protect her vital internal spaces.

This was not a wild gamble, though. Commodore Conti* was an experienced ship master, and had served with distinction during the naval actions of the Civil War. His ships were fast, and their SG search radar sets were both accurate and reliable. It would take a serious misadventure to lose their three-knot advantage over the German flotilla.

So when the Lexington task group approached on a converging course, setting up to turn across Lütjens’ bow as they neared effective firing range, Lütjens could only do the sensible thing, and order the faster wing detached at flank speed. Opening a twelve knot delta with the older battleships, who kept their turbines at a more conservative RPM to preserve them for battle itself, the chase was on.

Fire was exchanged off and on between the Lexington and the German cruisers at the head of the main body, deterring them from slipping in close enough to second guess identifying the contacts as capital ships. The chase continued for sixty-four minutes before the doubts began to creep up in Lütjens’ flagship. The Americans, seemingly eager to give battle, were now leading him on a chase. As they considered breaking off, flash Enigma traffic from Pommern came in on the wireless: six battleships closing at flank speed, holding fire for now. But they’d be parallel soon.

As Lütjens’ main body came about to an intercept course with the best estimation of the American battleships’ track, Levin’s flagship Monitor fired her first salvo against Pommern at a range of 21 km, achieving a bracket on the first salvo thanks to her radar telemeter. Haiti paired off with the Sachsen , while Constellation and Michael Kohlhaas ganged up on Bayern. At the tail, Nat Turner and Jean-Paul Marat targeted Württemberg and Baden respectively.

The Great War vintage super dreadnoughts had not received the full refits that the Kriegsmarine had planned to bring them up to contemporary standards. That money had gone to new ships instead. Burning oil from refitted boilers had extended their range and wrung a theoretical extra knot of speed out of the Bayern -class, but the turbines themselves were worn out and could not use the extra horsepower. All except Pommern lacked radar sets, and they all used the older 38 cm SK C/15 with a shorter effective range and slower effective fire rate.

Their armor would have been excellent in their own time, but against 41 cm AP Mk 8 “super heavy” shells, they were in serious trouble. The 1225 kg shells scored both main belt as well as deck penetrations during the drive-by engagement.

The total engagement time lasted no more than ten minutes. In that time, the American ships averaged between 13 and 15 full salvos against their targets. The short and furious action left the German ships burning and combat ineffective at best. Wurttemberg took the worst of it. On her sixth salvo, one of Nat Turner ‘s 46 cm shells detonated in the barbette for her B turret, shattering the anti-flash doors to her magazine. After thirteen seconds in which caustic white smoke belched from the perforation, the magazine flash-fired, ejecting both A and B turrets, and breaking the ship’s keel.

The rest of the squadron did not get off lightly, but they avoided sinking with nearly all hands in a few precious moments. At the head of the column, the already damaged Pommern had her Y turret knocked out by a penetrating 41 cm shell, and multiple hits across her belt and superstructure set the ship ablaze, while a diving hit started dangerous flooding in her citadel. Behind her, Sachsen scored a few hits on Haiti , but suffered a direct hit to her bridge as well as one that flooded one of her engine rooms, pushing her out of the line as the hits continued to rain down on her.

Bayern , double-teamed by Michael Kohlhaas and Constellation ‘s combined 21 guns, lost two turrets to penetrating hits, and was already listing dangerously from flooding by the time the engagement ended. The order to abandon ship would soon come, though some 300 sailors had yet to make it to the lifeboats when she keeled over. At the back, Baden was left burning with her main engineering totally knocked out.

Levin had completed the disengagement just in time to surprise Lütjens squadron coming out of the haze, executing a perfect turn across his bow to open the second round at nearly twenty-five kilometers. Modern battleships now locked in mortal combat, the prize being surface dominance in the Atlantic Ocean.

While it took nearly five minutes for Lütjens to array into a line to square up against the American line, he did have an extra ship at least. Bismarck was better protected than Pommern , particularly against plunging fire, but she proved ill-suited to the task.

The German 40.6 cm SK C/36, a licensed copy of the British BL 16-inch Mark II, was very comparable to the American 41 cm/50 caliber Mark 6; slightly flatter shooting with its lighter projectile, with armor penetrating and post-penetration performance very comparable. While the fight had begun with Monitor in her immunity zone against Bismarck ‘s shells, the distance closed sufficiently within the first few minutes that both ships were in mortal danger.

While many of Bismarck ‘s 40.6 cm shells overpenetrated, passing nearly harmlessly through the unarmored extended hull or superstructure of Monitor , her own banded armor scheme ensured that most of Monitor ‘s hits would detonate. Even in these less vital areas of the ship, nearly 20 kg of Composition A-3 explosive in the 1225 kg shells would do ghastly things to men and machinery in the compartment.

It would come down, ultimately, to the accuracy of gunnery, and the alacrity of their crews, on both counts Monitor had the edge. More experienced compared to the German sailors who’d spent too much time cooped up in port or tramping around the Baltic and North Seas, they had the edge in effective rate of fire, accuracy, and damage control.

Next in line, Haiti engaged Tirpitz. Haiti had suffered more hits in the previous engagement, and faced difficulty in salvo coordination, taking multiple salvos to dial in B turret to shoot in concert with the others. Consequently, Tirpitz was slightly luckier than her sister, but not enough to compensate for Haiti’ s harder hitting shells.

The third Bismarck -class, Hermann der Cherusker , was not so lucky. Her opponent, Michael Kohlhaas , was an altogether more dangerous beast, incorporating successive lessons in battleship design. Michael Kohlhaas mounted twelve 41-cm/50 caliber Mark 7 guns (a lighter, improved version of the earlier Mark 6) in four 3-gun turrets, and was protected by a 410 mm thick main belt backed by 25 mm of STS structural armor, inclined outward at 21 gradian. Since the ships never closed to less than 16 km, Michael Kohlhaas fought Herman der Cherusker within the immunity zone of her own guns. Despite accurate German gunnery, she shrugged off multiple main belt hits, and even a hit to the face of her A turret, while systematically dismantling her opponent.

Constellation , the wiry Toledo- class battlecruiser with her queer all-forward battery of nine 41-cm/50 calibre Mark 5 guns and turbo-electric propulsion, engaged the German super-heavy Großedeutschland. A modernized early interwar design, she faced the fruits of Anglo-German naval cooperation. The Friedrich der Große -class ships were fully modern, with an all-or-nothing armor scheme, with a maximum thickness of 380 mm in her main belt, and an improved, natively designed gun-laying radar derived from her British-licensed predecessor.

Despite the many years between their relative design and construction, they were in most respects equal. While Großedeutschland ‘s armor was thicker on paper, Constellation ‘s inclined belt had effectively equal protection despite being only 350 mm at its thickest. Fresh out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard with new radar suite and enhanced anti-aircraft armament, she was as good as any ship in her weight class, and she would fight like a lion against Großedeutschland to prove it.

Aft of Constellation , Jean-Paul Marat faced the other German super heavy Friedrich der Große , with the only notable edge in ‘hard’ characteristics of mounting three more main guns, an advantage soon neutralized when on the third salvo a German shell scored a partial-penetration of the X turret barbette, jamming the turret drive and rendering the turret useless for the duration of the engagement.

At the end of the column, the two interwar German light battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau paired up against the Nat Turner. Mounting six apiece of the 38 cm SK C/28 in three 2-gun turrets, they faced a ship with nine 46 cm/48 caliber Mark 2 guns and protected by 410 mm of Class A hardened plate backed by 25 mm of STS. It might have been the most lopsided engagement of the entire battle had the electrical systems not failed in her X turret, which powered, among other things, the shell hoists needed to move the 1,740 kg AP Mark 3 shells up from the barbette into the turret. Worse, the electrical short started a fire in the hydraulic fluid, resolved by flooding compartments above her magazine while damage control teams fought the fire.

The death of the Kriegsmarine

The German battleships gave a good accounting for themselves for the first few minutes after the lines joined into a combat configuration. Having taken only minor damage as they extricated themselves from the dangerous crossing of their t, they entered into a protracted battle with a slight advantage in all types of surface ships. 7 capital ships to 6 for the Americans, 6 to 2 in heavy cruisers, 7 to 4 in light cruisers, and 12 to 8 in destroyers.

But it was never going to end well. The Kriegsmarine , despite all the rapid construction and technology transfer from the British, was simply not ready for operations at this scale. The luck had simply run out, facing an enemy that had already been blooded in the Civil War and refined those hard-won lessons into a well-drilled fleet. The American fleet was mauled by the battle, and none of Levin’s ships escaped without needing long stints in port for repair, but German naval ambitions went to the bottom of the Atlantic.

The German battle line fell apart from the centre. Hermann der Cherusker withered under Michael Kohlhaas’ pummeling, losing two turrets to direct hits before losing most of her superstructure to successive hits. She burned and flailed, trying to fight on until finally a salvo broke through her center line belt, detonating in a boiler room. Losing first motive power one of her shafts, then main electrical power, she drifted out of the line.

Scharnhorst died next. Even in her reduced state, Nat Turner scored multiple central citadel hits, including ones below the waterline. Unable to repel firepower of that magnitude, she would take on water rapidly, and with her internal bulkheads turned into swiss cheese, she would sink shortly after her captain ordered abandon ship.

Ultimately, only Gneisnau and Tirpitz would survive the engagement, and only thanks to the heroic action of the lighter ships, laying smoke and making torpedo runs to break up the American line at high cost. Lütjens himself would answer for the death of the Kriegsmarine’s surface fleet with his life, killed when one of Monitor ‘s shells detonated near the bridge.

It matters not whether Bismarck ,Hermann der Cherusker ,Friedrich der Große , and Großedeutschland were sunk by gunfire or by their crews smashing open their seacocks. They were already sinking from American gunfire, and the petulant hastening of that inevitable only succeeded in sending more German sailors to a watery grave.

Hitler’s ambitions of choking off the Arctic convoys and convincing the UK that any cause of the would-be United Nations was doomed died in the cold waters off Iceland. The victory permanently shifted the naval balance of power in the Atlantic, rendering the remains of the German surface ships into a fleet-in-being while the U-boat arms took up the naval fight virtually alone in the Atlantic.

German ships

Capital ships

Bayern
Baden
Sachsen
Württemberg
(28,530 t, 8 x 38 cm guns, 21 kts)

Pommern
(43,800 t, 8 x 38 cm guns, 26 kts)

Scharnhorst
Gneisenau
(32,600 t, 6 x 38 cm guns, 31 kts)

Bismarck
Tirpitz
Hermann der Cherusker
(53,400 t, 8 x 40.6 cm guns, 30 kts)

Friedrich der Große
Großedeutschland
(64,400 t, 9 x 40.6 cm guns, 30 kts)

American ships

Capital ships

Lexington
(42,450 t, 9 x 41 cm guns, 33 kts)

Constellation
(47,550 t, 9 x 41 cm guns, 33 kts)

Monitor
Haiti
(43,200 t, 9 x 41 cm guns, 30 kts)

Jean-Paul Marat
Michael Kohlhaas
(63,500 t, 12 x 41 cm guns, 30 kts)

Nat Turner
(65,100 t, 9 x 46 cm guns, 30 kts) *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation